Week 5- Digital media

This week’s lecture focused on the impact of digital media on journalism and public relations. Digital media refers to the modern ways of encoding media data and distributing it through platforms such as the internet. This has become popular, especially as citizen journalism becomes prevalent because of easily accessible tools such as google and social media. Citizen journalism is like the concept of prosumers in the sense that those who were formally the consumer/audience, now possess the press tools to produce media and inform each other.

My key reading, ‘The future of journalism’ emphasises the descent of quality in journalistic practices becoming lost in the rise of digital media. Quality and accuracy become questionable as citizen journalists do not have the same professional practices that journalists have learnt and gained through years of experience. Authenticity and balance are key components of stories and the idea that “fewer facts [are being] checked” (Haak., et al 2012: 2925) can have an impact on the output. Contrastingly, my found reading ‘Digital journalism’, views digital media positively. The authors have perspectives that traditional journalism “inhibits media innovation” (Kawamoto., 2003: 11) because of its constraints and out-dated practices. Digital media benefits the fifth estate as the self-produced media escapes the governmental filtering system. This allows an event to be retold exactly how it happened, rather than how others want to portray it.

I understand that PR has accepted digital media more and has changed tactics to suit the modern technologies. The industry has recognised the potential of vlogging for communicating power and influence to a large current and target audience. Unfortunately, this only ensures that authenticity is questioned further due to the infiltration of advertising from PR. This is an issue as consumers are unaware that they’re engaging with promoted products and therefore their ‘self-formed’ opinion is influenced. For example, famous YouTuber ‘FunForLouis’ released a North Korea vlog series in August which stimulated backlash as it documented all the positive aspects of the country, regardless of its strict rules and laws. This encouraged the public to assume he was sponsored to create the propagandist video, although he did not confirm this himself.

I would find investigating the impact of citizen journalism on the public audience interesting to find out if it is negative or not. To study this, I would use online surveys for my methodology to gather an understanding of how people decode citizen journalism and how it influences their product purchasing decisions.